Chan Gailey: "The buck stops with me"

We played extremely poor offensively and defensively today. As bad as it was, I thought we had a chance coming out. The turnover right after halftime I thought really hurt. It killed the momentum we created right at the end of the first half. Biggest thing is we could not stop the run, the scramble and quarterback read stuff. The quarterback rushing for that many yards, normally you do not win. (We) Could not hit a deep ball; we had several chances. Could not hit a deep ball. Had some opportunities, but the bottom line—we just played poorly on offense and defense today.

Q: Did this game remind you of the team’s performance in the San Francisco game?

A: We played bad. We played poorly. If you play poorly against a good football team, you are going to look extremely bad. We played poorly and we looked extremely bad. We did.

Q: How surprised were you by the lack of execution?

A: You are always surprised by that. You expect to execute all the time. There were times where I thought we had them bottled up and he got out of there. There were times I thought we hit some passes. We would drop a pass here, drop a pass there and miss one. It kills drives. We are not good enough to misfire and keep things going right now. We are not good enough to do that.

Q: Is anger part of the emotion today?

A: Sure it is. You are angry. You are angry at yourself because you did not get the team ready to play at the level they needed to play to win the ball game. When they do not play well, the buck stops with me. I understand that.

Q: What should the players be playing for at this point?

A: I want them to play for themselves, for the fans, for professionalism and for pride. If you start going out there and having too many things that go into your mind about why you are playing the game, you will be able to give it up too easily. You need to be out there, playing for yourselves and the fans. Those are the most important things.

A: I thought he ran the ball well. He did some really good things. We could not get him any screen passes. We could not get him the ball in the open field like we wanted to. He made some things happen. Then we got so far behind, we just could not stick with the running game the way we wanted to.

Q: How tough is it to play without the home field advantage?

A: I do not think where we played today had anything to do with it. You play good or you play bad whether it is home, road or anywhere. The bottom line is you have to play well. I do not care where you are. If you are a good football team, you play well. If you are not a good football team, you do not play well. It does not matter where it is and I do not think where you play…you would obviously like to play at home but I said the other day you like to play 16 of them at home, but you cannot. That is the way it is. You cannot worry about that. That is not what affected us.

Q: Talk about the quarterback sneak on first-and-10.

A: They were bringing the safety off the edge and he could have thrown the ball outside to Stevie (Johnson), but the guy had him pressed up. He ended up instead of taking a timeout and taking a delay, he ran the ball where the ball was supposed to be run by the blocking scheme. He really just kept it into that hole to tried to salvage a bad play and let us play the next down.